20 July 2012 By Steve Binge

Commercial buyers 'struggle to get funding' for Spanish real estate

It is difficult for investors in commercial real estate to obtain funding from Spanish banks for a purchase.

This is the assertion of Michael Haddock, a director at CBRE, who told Reuters issues over the capitalisation of the nation's financial institutions have "made it even harder to get debt as a buyer of real estate in Spain".

He added that, because Spanish banks are concentrating on minimising their exposure to residential property assets, "they tend not to be dealing with offloading commercial real estate".

On Wednesday (July 18th), the Bank of Spain announced the country's financial institutions had almost €156 billion (£122.35 billion) of bad loans on their balance sheets in May.

This accounted for 8.95 per cent of total lending by the banks, the highest ratio it has been since 1994.

According to the country's central bank, both lending and deposits declined in May on an annual and monthly basis. The former dropped by 3.82 per cent year-on-year and by 0.59 per cent compared to April, Bloomberg reported.